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Battle of the Bay
The Battle of the Bay was the first military action of the Accordance War. Overview On May 12th, 1970, the Battle of the Bay commenced in Berkeley, where some of the heaviest fighting took place. The local commoners, following a planted rumor that perpetrators of the Beltaine Massacre had taken refuge on the university campus, massed on the grounds. There they were surrounded by noble forces and told to surrender. They didn’t, and a vicious but ultimately one-sided melee ensued. A handful of commoners broke through the sidhe lines and ran off to warn the rest of the Bay. Had the entire commoner populace joined into one mass army, would they have won? Possibly. Numbers of that magnitude would have been hard to overcome, even by the sidhe. The commoners’ biggest weakness was that few of them had any skill at fighting, and those that did usually practiced in bar brawls or street gangs. Faced with armed and armored forces with tactical precision, they didn’t have much of a chance. To make matters worse, motleys chose to defend their own territories rather than fight for the whole Bay. To leave their neighborhoods undefended would allow those sneaky sidhe to occupy their freeholds. As a result, the Bay area was captured bit by bit. The nominal leader of the Bay changelings, Ranalf Sumner, made his stand at Coit Tower, which was located on a steep and very defensible hill. There, they held off the sidhe for several days. Unfortunately, a false retreat lured some of the defenders off the hill, where they were cut to pieces by hidden archers. The tower fell in short order. Beset by sidhe at the Presidio, Nerrit Skinner, Sumner’s successor, surrendered his forces in exchange for a promise of mercy for all who laid down their arms. In general, this was observed. However, fighting continued sporadically for another day, and many commoners paid dearly for their resistance. Other commoners tried to escape. Those who ran into Chinatown were never seen again. A few managed to slip past sentries and flee to San José or Sacramento. Dafyll allowed the vanquished their freedom in exchange for a number of hostages. The sidhe got most of the freeholds, of course. One of the final places to fall, not surprisingly, was Alcatraz. The abandoned prison was held by a mixed group of commoners who found other retreats blocked. The combination of aerial assault and subtle cantrip wore down the defenders, though not before sidhe bodies littered the yard. Of thirty defenders, only a dozen fae were captured alive. Lord Markhill ap Gwydion passed summary judgement on the prisoners; since they liked the prison so much, they could stay there. He had them hidden in solitary confinement, away from curious tourists and away from each other, their food brought to them by soundless, invisible chimera. Markhill’s lieutenant, who survived his lord at the Battle of Buckhead, neglected to mention the prisoners during exchange negotiations at the close of the war. The survivors were discovered in 1979. Of the dozen, seven were still alive, though in various stages of madness. One cell was empty; a court seer claimed the inmate had fallen so deeply into Bedlam that he had slipped into the Dreaming. * Dates: May 12th - 20th, 1970. References # CTD. Fool's Luck: The Way of the Commoner, p. 35. Category:Changeling: The Dreaming Events